Do It Yourself: Energy Savings at Home
Sealing up your house

Watch the video:

Kathy Hopkins, University of Maine Cooperative Extension Educator: Hi, the summer’s over, winter is coming and you may be interested in ways that you can save energy dollars. The biggest way to save energy is by using less energy. The less you use, the less you pay out, the more you save. So, we’re going to go through this house and we are going to look for cracks and tiny places we can seal up because that’s the biggest loss of heat in your house. A one-sixteenth-inch crack around a window can be like having a three-inch hole in your wall. So, let’s see what we can find!

If you’re trying to seal off leaks around windows or doors in your house, then there are a number of products you can try. We have here some expanding foam, which is good for large leaks and cracks, usually around plumbing fixtures. When they cut large holes in the wall to put plumbing fixtures through, you can use this expanding foam. One caution is you should always use rubber gloves of some sort with that because when the expanding foam gets applied, it sticks to whatever it applies to. So, put down some newspaper around something you’re going to be applying that on and use gloves to keep it off your hands.

Caulk is something you can use on windows to seal up small cracks. You first purchase the right kind of caulk; read the label to see what it says and where it can be applied. This is indoor/outdoor caulk -- it’s paintable and flexible. Load it in your caulk gun, push the trigger handle up, then you cut the tube of your caulk at an angle, and push the handle and move the caulk away from you up through a crack. If you have large cracks, you may want to apply something called backer rod first; it’s good for putting in cracks that are kind of wide to be filling in with caulk. What you can do is cut a piece off and press it into the crack. You can then caulk over it if you need to, but this will prevent a lot of air infiltration, especially cold air and especially cold air that comes in around doors and windows. This is also a good product to use in the basement if you have cracks between the sill plate and the foundation. You can also put in a couple layers of caulk, rather than putting in one big gob that will dry very slowly. You can put a couple of thinner applications through and that tends to work better.

This is rubber foam weather seal; it’s a sticky product that prevents air infiltration. It’s sticky on one side; you can apply this to one side of windows or door frames and then peel off the other side so it sticks on both sides. This makes a nice gap filler around leaky windows or doors; it prevents that air from infiltrating.

If you have electric outlets, you can put foam insulation behind the outlet. You can purchase these in most hardware stores and they come in single-size and double-size. Turn the power off, take your outlet cover off, fit the foam insulation behind it, and then put the outlet cover back on. If you have plugs, plastic plugs, safety plugs for kids, it will not only keep the kids out, it will keep the air out of your house as well.

Here’s a really no-cost idea you can use to block air infiltration through a window. Take empty plastic bags that you have lying around, fill up another plastic bag with them and put that in the window as a form of insulation. Shut the window tight on it, make sure the window locks, and you have a window sweep to keep the air from coming through the window. Once you get your plastic bags in the window, you may want to seal up the sides. You can use blue painters tape and you can put that right across the gap in your window and seal that up so you have less air infiltration. This comes off really easily in the spring, which is a nice feature. It won’t take the paint off, but it will keep the air out this winter.